Everyone - well, almost everyone - knows "Brave New World". Some may even have read it. But how many have heard of, let alone read, Aldous Husley's counterpoint to "Brave New World", his vision of a better world, a society that is sane and conducive to human happiness, a place that never existed, except in his novel "Island"?
This relatively unknown novel was written by Huxley at the end of his life, in 1962, and it depicts a world that exists only in the Kingdom of Pala, an island halfway between Sumatra and the Andaman Islands, where for a hundred and twenty years an ideal society has flourished.
Aldous Huxley died of cancer a year after "Island", his last novel, was published. Perhaps the passage "Lightly", spoken by a character in this final book could be the author speaking from, or to, himself — a reminder of how he felt he should approach dying. He died on November 22nd, 1963, the same day the American President Kennedy was assassinated, and so Huxley's death never even made the news.
It's Sunday morning, and it looks like it's going to be another hot day, so what better way to spend it than relaxing on the old sofa on the veranda and listening to the audiobook of "Island"? Absolute bliss!
(You may have noticed that I've just now spelled 'veranda' without an 'h' which seems to have been standard in the US since the 1850s while British English kept the 'h' for about a hundred more years. These days veranda seems to be more common everywhere and I decided to comply but no-one is going to make me call the Gulf of Mexico anything else. The Gulf of America will be consigned to history in four years' time.)
